A sonnet about Batman in the style of William Shakespeare
Oh Batman, knight of darkness, hero bold
Fierce in battle, strong in heart and mind
Defender of the weak and young, behold
Thy righteous justice, keen and unconfined
With cape and cowl, thou roam'st the gloomy night
In search of evil, lurking in the shade
With batarangs and gadgets, swift and right
Thou fight'st with valor, never unafraid
Thou art the Dark Knight, feared by thy foes
But loved by Gotham, city of thy birth
Thy loyal allies, Robin and Batgirl knows
Thy strength of spirit, unmatched on this earth
Oh Batman, thy courage doth inspire
Thy legend shall never fade, nor expire.
AI Experiments Featuring Monkeys
I was experimenting with AI writing and images and was experimenting. My initial testing was for serious subject matters, and it proved to be surprisingly well-written.
I decided to experiment to see how absurd things could get and was not disappointed. Here's the first result.
Oh primate of the jungle wild, with fur so soft and warm,
Your funny face is full of cheer, your spirit full of charm.
Your leaps and bounds are so delight, your antics such a sight,
Your antics bring joy and laughter, day and night.
Your antics full of curious play, never a dull moment today,
Your cries bring life to the trees, your presence is here to stay.
Your chatter fills the air with sound, as you swing from tree to tree,
Your kind is full of joy, of this much I guarantee.
Your life is full of family, and you are never lonely,
Your love and care for one another, is so pure and honestly.
Your life is filled with plenty of adventure, curiosity and more,
Your life is full of joy, and near the jungle floor.
Oh primate of the jungle wild, I sit and watch you play,
Your furry face and kind spirit, I shall never forget today.
Your life is full of joy and cheer, your presence warm and bright,
Your life is full of love and fun, and I am glad to be in your sight.
How to Delete Folder with Special Character in Windows 10/11
I ran into an issue where a folder was created by some application with a special Unicode character that Windows Explorer doesn't seem to play nicely with. I also was unable to tell what the character was since nothing would reveal it. The folder's there, but you can't rename or delete it. If I tried to remove or delete it, I'd get an error saying the folder doesn't exist:
I have LockHunter installed but it wasn't able to delete it for some reason. The easiest way I found to delete the folder was to use Git Bash and then use the appropriate commands to rename or delete the folder.
Browse to the folder where the offending folder is located. For example purposes, I'll use c:\temp\folder1
Rename:
Delete:
If you don't have Git Bash or are not a developer/power user, you can download the portable version from https://git-scm.com/download/win to use temporarily. Once you decompress the files to a folder, you'll find git-bash.exe which you can double-click to run and use the above commands.
Using Laravel Vite with MAMP
As seen in other posts, I use MAMP quite a bit for my web development environment. I know I can run docker, or any of the other platforms out there but they use more memory and resources that I'd prefer to devote to my dev tools.
I started a new Laravel project and wanted to use MAMP but Vite was throwing errors due to the SSL not matching out of the box.
When adding
to my blade file, I'd get errors including:
I found articles saying to add --https or --host to my package json command but then I got this error:
Load MAMP Pro, add your host and generate your SSL certificates. For this example, we'll use set the host name to my-app.test, and assume you're storing the SSL keys in the default location.
Open vite.config.js and add the following 2 lines:
Then add this to defineConfig section:
You should now be able to run npm run dev and have no issues.
Sample full vite.config.js file for easy reference:
Deploying Storybook via Gitlab Pipeline via SFTP
This is an update to my previous script to deploy Storybook to S3 via Gitlab Pipelines. We're running a dev server on EC2 and I wanted to be able to deploy the project using SFTP. This assumes you already created a new user account on the FTP server.
Create an SSH key on your local machine and save it without a password using the following command:
You should have two new files in .ssh directory:
Copy content of private key and go back to GitLab project. Navigate to Settings -> CI/CD -> Variables -> Expand -> Add Variable. GitLab’s variable is a key-value pair. Name key SSH_PRIVATE_KEY and paste private key in value field. Click Add Variable.
Add two more variables:
Copy the contents of public key and go back to remote server. Login as the same user which you have specified in SSH_USER GitLab’s variable.
Navigate to /home/<username>/.ssh. If directory .ssh doesn’t exist, then create it. Paste the public key into authorized_keys file. If you don’t have authorized_keys file, create it.
Important Note: I ended up using node:16 for my script because my instance of Storybook was using Webpack 4 and the node:latest was using Node 18 which wasn't compatible. If you're using webpack 5, you should be able to use a later version. I'm also using node:16 instead of alpine or buster because I ran into issues adding the SSH keys. I'll work on optimizing this later for performance but it works.
Add GTM to Gatsby using Helmet
One of my devs needed to add Google Tag Manager (GTM) to an older Gatsby project we built and he was running into issues implementing the GTM code provided by Google since the react-google-tag-manager package required a newer version of Gatsby and its dependencies.
The issue turned out to be that the strings needed to be escaped for Helmet/React to process it correctly. If you're using an older version of Gatsby, the snippet below should help you add GTM and call your events as needed. Just add it to your main template file.
How to deploy a React app to Amazon S3 using Gitlab CI/CD
I've been trying to build more CI/CD scripts using Gitlab to automate pipeline deployments for work. Here's a useful one for building and deploying a React app to Amazon S3.
You'll need to add a variable called S3_BUCKET_NAME to your repo or replace the variable with your bucket path.
How to Setup CI/CD of Jigsaw Site to Digital Ocean Droplet Using Bitbucket Pipelines
I created a new personal resume site and decided I wanted to build a static site since it wouldn't be frequently updated. I evaluated Nuxt, Gatsby, and a few others but settled on Jigsaw, a static site generator based on Laravel. I had never used it before and figured this would be a good learning experience while building something I needed. I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it is to use and setup, so kudos to the Tighten team for putting together such an elegant solution.
I wanted to get a CI/CD pipeline configured to handle the site's deployment but couldn't find any working tutorials, so I'm sharing my solution in case it helps others. I'm using Bitbucket for this since it's a personal private repo, so I'm using Bitbucket Pipelines.
After you enable pipelines for your project, you'll need to configure a Pipelines Repository Variable in your project. Go to the settings tab in your repo, and then select Repository variables:
Add 3 variables:
Generate an SSH key (or use your own) and add it to your server under the SSH Keys tab in Pipelines:
I generated a new key and then added it to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys for the account.
Add this YAML snippet to your bitbucket-pipelines.yml in your root. This will use PHP 7.4, install rsync, node + npm, composer, and build the production version of the site to deploy to the specified folder.
The -aVP switch for rsync is to give me verbose progress feedback so I can see what's happening. If you don't need the detail, switch it to -a.
I received a few errors when rsync ran. In case you run into them as well, here's the list and fixes. The first was:
rsync: failed to set times on "$FOLDER": Operation not permitted (1)
I added --no-t to resolve that and then got a new error:
rsync: failed to set permissions on "$FOLDER": Operation not permitted (1)
which was fixed with adding the switch --no-perms. My final rsync command became:
How to use Backblaze B2 with Laravel
I am working on a Laravel project and decided to use a Backblaze bucket as it's cheaper for storage when compared to AWS S3. I couldn't find a tutorial on how to get it working from scratch and I tested a bunch of Laravel B2 libraries that didn't end up working. The good news is that you don't need a special B2 plugin and instead can use the S3 package recommended by the Laravel docs.
If you haven't added the flysystem-aws-s3 package, add it to your project using composer:
Login to your B2 account and create your bucket with your required settings. Once created, you'll want to create a new application key with the permissions you need for your app. You should get a confirmation once it's generated:
Open your .env file and locate the settings for AWS. You'll need to add one key that's not there by default:
Match the settings in your .env from the application key to the values below.
Now you should be able to call the Laravel storage system like normal:
How to Setup a CI/CD Pipeline for Storybook.js using Gitlab
I just spent a few hours setting up a Gitlab pipeline to deploy a Storybook.js site. Of course the end result ended up being much simpler than I made it out to be. Like everything else on my blog, I'm sharing in case anyone else can use the information to save time.
Just put this in your gitlab-ci.yml and it'll take care of caching the node modules and building your static version of Storybook to deploy.